The weirdest travel stories of 2007

— -- 2007 was not kind to travelers. Flights were packed and delays legion. Gas prices soared. The dollar tanked. But at least travel news offered some levity. USA TODAY's Jayne Clark reviews stories that made us shudder — or laugh. And laugh we did, because if we didn't have a sense of humor about travel's vagaries, we would have just stayed home.

Crowded flights sparked tempers, igniting nastiness more often associated with barrooms than aircraft cabins. Among this year's low blows:

•A fracas involving 20 passengers erupted in June on a flight from Lagos, Nigeria, to London. It was touched off when a passenger took exception to the reclining seat in front of him. Fliers duked it out with fists, bottles and belts, causing the captain to make an emergency landing.

•In July, a flight from St. Petersburg, Russia, to Turkey turned back after the crew was unable to break up a fight involving three inebriated men. It started, said the Russian News and Information Agency, when one of the men was "given the cold shoulder" by a woman he was chatting up and hit her in the face.

•A British couple pleaded guilty last summer to charges stemming from disruptive behavior on a 2005 flight from London to Jamaica, which included pursuit of "mile-high club" membership. After reportedly having sex in an aircraft bathroom, the couple, who had been drinking, caused additional disturbances in the cabin, and wound up handcuffed as the flight was diverted to Bermuda.

Passengers weren't the only ones guilty of bad behavior in 2007. In April, a Northwest Airlines pilot locked himself in an airline restroom, where he had a loud, obscenity-laced conversation on his cellphone as passengers boarded his flight in Las Vegas. When confronted by a passenger, the pilot cussed at him. The flight was canceled as a result of "inappropriate language by a crewmember," the airline said.

In other flight crew missteps:

•A British Airways flight from New Delhi to London was delayed 13 hours after the pilot refused to fly, saying he'd had a lousy night's sleep in a noisy hotel room and needed to catch up on his rest.

•SkyWest airlines apologized to a passenger who said he was forced to urinate in an airsickness bag during a short flight in March because the only restroom was closed due to a malfunctioning light. The man told the Salt Lake Tribune he'd had two "really big beers. It was like I had no choice." The pilot called police upon landing in Salt Lake, but the airline later gave the passenger a travel voucher in addition to the apology.

Rude and annoying people weren't the only elements that made unpleasant flights downright ugly. Consider these:

•Toilets overflowed on an Amsterdam-Newark flight on Continental Airlines in June, causing passenger Collin Brock to tell a Seattle television station King 5 News, "I was forced to sit next to human excrement for seven hours." (Full story:Continental Airlines apologizes for sewage overflow)